I learned something the other day that had me questioning my worth as a parent: one of my teenage sons has been getting lap dances in our basement. Brothers being brothers, I only found out because the other one ratted him out, laughing, with a big smile on his face. A guilty smile, if I had to guess.

To be clear, no one had stolen our VISA card and ordered up someone named Sapphire through 1-800-STRIPPR. The lap dances were available as one of the many delightful features of Grand Theft Auto V, a video game released last month whose existence is likely foretold in Revelation as a sign of the end times.

Apart from visiting peeler bars, the main objectives of the game are to shoot or run down innocent citizens and race around in stolen cars committing crimes with as little regard as possible to traffic regulations. Oh, yeah. There’s also a lot of really dreadful language that teenage boys clearly love but would never say in front of their moms.

Naturally, this paradigm of our collective humanity is the most popular entertainment product in history, hitting more than a $1 billion in sales just three days after its Sept. 17 release.

Our family wouldn’t have added to those sales if I’d had anything to say about it. I’d banned all previous editions of the game because they weren’t kid-friendly, even though my sons claimed that all their friends were allowed to play it and that I was a big meanie.

GTA5 has an “R” rating, which is a joke if they think it’s keeping the game out of the hands of impressionable young people. You don’t get to $1 billion in sales without a lot of teenagers buying it.

The kids tricked my wife — a criminal lawyer with feminist leanings, although an innocent when it comes to video games — into buying GTA5 for “me” for my birthday. I opened the wrapping and was just two or three words into my speech about how inappropriate it was before they gleefully ripped it from my hands and shot off downstairs to the rec room. We’ve barely seen them since.

“Well, they’re older,” I said. “I guess it’s OK now.” That was before I found out about the lap dances.

Strip shows in immensely popular video games being played by millions of teenage boys is part of what I’ve jokingly been calling our society’s “post-feminist era.” Sure, women can go to medical school and more or less get paid the same as men, but how far have they really come (and all of us) when Miley Cyrus feels she needs to dry hump a stranger on a prime time stage to be successful?

Or what about all those young female business students at UBC merrily chanting what’s become known as the “rape chant” last month.

“Y-O-U-N-G at UBC, we like ’em young, Y is for your sister, O is for oh so tight, U is for underage, N is for no consent, G is for go to jail.” Their mothers, aunts and grandmothers, who fought for their right to attend business school, must be so proud.

Further evidence of the “post-feminist era” is the sexy Halloween costumes for little girls that this newspaper wrote about last week. Nothing says female empowerment more than a 10-year-old girl dressed up as a French maid in a short skirt and garters.

It all comes down to our continuing sophomoric attitudes toward sex.

One of the most important developments of 20th century feminism was to give women control over their own sexuality, including everything from reproduction to orgasm. But somewhere along the way, aspects of that otherwise healthy development in human advancement went off the rails.

Where traditional feminism worked to bring equality to women in work, family life and citizenship, modern feminists are devoted to making prostitution an acceptable career choice and angrily denouncing as “slut shaming” anyone who might helpfully try to suggest that young women are playing with fire if they go out at night and get drunk with strangers while wearing skirts that are so short everyone can see their hoo-ha.

Elizabeth Renzetti, the always excellent Globe and Mail columnist, wrote earlier this month of her shock at watching her seven-year-old daughter and two of her friends “dancing and singing the lyrics to Ke$ha’s Die Young (‘that magic in your pants, it’s making me blush’).”

As a “weary old feminist” with “sexism cataracts … inured to magazines selling nubile female flesh for profit, and presenting young starlets as if they’re only as interesting as their underpants,” Renzetti wrote about the challenges of raising daughters at a time when they are still too often “valued for the content of their bras, rather than the content of their character.”

But our current indiscreet, hyper-sexualized culture that so casually offers strip clubs in video games, friends with benefits and song lyrics that present women as hos and bitches also presents a minefield for the parents of sons trying to instil a healthy view of sex and respect for women.

The sexual freedom unleashed, in part, by feminism has been terrific for the world. But more respect, including self-respect, for the intimacy and privacy of sex without implying anything shameful, would make it even better.

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